Smoke & Whispers (19 page)

She said, ‘He’s gone.’

‘So I see.’

‘It’s over. He’s not likely to make a fuss.’

‘Sarah. Believe me when I say I couldn’t give a fuck what kind of fuss he tries to make.’

‘You didn’t want to kill him.’

‘Evidently not.’

‘And I’m glad you didn’t.’

He said, ‘Maybe so. But there’s nothing I want more than for that bastard to walk under a train. Soon. Very soon. Now will do.’

‘I don’t really think people get away with very much.’

‘Don’t you? Don’t you really?’

‘No, Gerard. I don’t.’

‘Well, it beats me what world you’re living in.’

‘He’s a shell, Gerard. He’s a man without a middle. Talking to him was like shouting down a well. You don’t think that’s a punishment?’

‘Sweet God above. That’s not a punishment. It’s a point of view.’

Somewhere, streets away, a door closed loudly.

Sarah ran a hand through her hair. She wondered what kind of a mess she looked like. Then wondered why that mattered.

‘You did the right thing,’ she said.

‘Letting him go?’

‘It’s what Buffy would have done,’ she said, before she could stop herself.

Gerard opened his mouth, and closed it again. He took another toke on his cigar. Then said, ‘I’m sure I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Then let’s change the subject,’ she said. ‘You didn’t find Wright by yourself, did you? You had help. You hired Zoë Boehm.’

He didn’t reply at first. Kept staring skywards, as if expecting a heavenly messenger to be dropping in soon. When he exhaled, it was as if he were talking cloud: a big language, not understood by the earthbound.

‘I lied about that,’ Gerard said at last. ‘About Zoë’s card.’

‘I know.’

‘I didn’t just find it. It was clipped to the report she sent me.’

‘Right.’

‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘you only found out about it by sneaking into my room. So don’t mistake an admission for an apology.’

Now that sounded more like Gerard.

He said, ‘That’s what brought you here in the first place, isn’t it? Zoë.’

‘What happened to her, Gerard?’

‘I don’t know. Well, she did her job. She found Wright. Told me about Jack Gannon, his . . . sponsor. It was her who came up with the idea of the party. Gathering. Whatever you want to call it. I’d wanted a look at Wright without him knowing. That was her solution.’

‘She produced the list of local worthies.’

‘She got some local recruitment consultants to come up with it. Sarah – all that time, I never laid eyes on her. We spoke on the phone, or e-mailed. But I never met her. I didn’t lie to you about that.’

‘But you hired her because of me. I mean, I’m the reason you’d heard of her.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘And I came here to identify her body.’

‘Her
body
?’

‘Yes, Gerard. Her body.’

‘She’s
dead
?’

‘I did say body, Gerard.’

‘But I didn’t – I never – I assumed she’d just . . . I don’t know what I assumed. It didn’t matter to me. She’d found Wright. By the time I came north, she’d left. She’d done her job. It wasn’t as if I needed her to . . . Dead?’

Sarah said, ‘That’s what it looks like.’

She wondered that she could say the words so coldly, but after the day she’d had, she was wrung out. All she had was a wall to lean against, and a dark sky overhead in which one or two stars were showing. After the rain, these pinpricks of light. And soon enough would come the morning.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry she’s dead. But I don’t think that had anything to do with what she was doing for me.’

‘That’s good, Gerard. So long as your conscience is clear.’

That reached a shriller pitch than she’d intended. Some of the higher notes whistled round the dark for a moment.

She said, ‘So she was gone before you arrived at the Bolbec.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you’ve no idea where she went.’

‘None at all. The last communication I had with her was that list of names. A fortnight ago. Sarah –’

‘The body was found last week. But Zoë checked out of the hotel the week before. The previous night, there’d been a crowd in the Bolbec bar, apparently. That sound odd to you?’

Gerard said, ‘It’s been quiet as a grave while I’ve been there.’ Then he thought about that, and added, ‘Sorry.’

She shook her head. Gerard had his own problems. Tonight was like the lancing of a boil: a lot of nasty stuff had poured out, but that didn’t mean the healing was done. It meant it was beginning. And whatever had become of Zoë, he knew nothing about it. Because if Alan Talmadge hadn’t led Zoë here, he must have followed her. The job Zoë had done for Gerard had had nothing to do with it.

A brief fizz released her from her thoughts. Gerard had tossed his cigar into a puddle. ‘What now?’ he said.

He looked deflated. She wondered how long it had been since he’d asked anyone what he should do.

‘Sarah?’

‘I take it that’s your car?’

He nodded.

‘Well, what you do is get in it and drive home.’ She put a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t flinch. ‘Paula needs you, Gerard. So does Zachary.’

‘He’ll never know what he needs.’

‘That doesn’t mean he doesn’t need it.’

She expected a harsh comeback to that. Was almost disappointed when none arrived.

‘What about you?’

‘I could do with a lift, since you ask.’

‘To where?’

Anywhere, she thought . . . ‘Anywhere. Somewhere far away, where I can get home from.’

‘When?’

‘Now’s good.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose it is.’

He patted his pockets for his car keys, and at that exact same moment, a phone buzzed.

‘Was that you or me?’ Gerard asked.

‘It was me.’

She fished it out.
One message received
, her screen said. It would be Russ, she thought. Russ, who was awake at five in the morning, wondering where on earth she’d got to.

But it wasn’t.

‘Anything important?’ Gerard asked.

‘You might say,’ she told him.

It was from Zoë.

17

At the bar on The Sage Gateshead’s third floor Sarah was more or less on a level with the nearby Baltic’s viewing gallery, which in turn gave a great view of the Sage. She’d heard there were those who thought the very best view of the Sage was from inside it, but anyone who’d done hard time among the concrete bunkers of London’s South Bank would have laughed that off. Way down below, the Tyne shifted choppily. On its far bank stood the Courts buildings, and to her right, between Sage and Baltic, was the Gateshead Millennium Bridge; a graceful eyelash she’d yet to see drop. About the same distance upriver was its industrial older brother, the Swing Bridge, squatly supported by a jetty-like structure the water lapped at hungrily. And immediately below her, a large white
H
on the concrete apron was a helicopter landing pad for the naval base.

And that was quite enough tourism, she knew, but Zoë was twenty minutes late, and Sarah herself had been early.

Bar, 3rd floor, the Sage. 11.30. Z.

As messages from beyond the grave went, it was hardly
I am risen
, but it would have to do. If the woman turned up to put some body behind it, Sarah would have no complaints.

Though if she was pressed, the lack of seating might have been mentioned.

She was leaning against the rail bordering the oval edge of the bar area – the bar itself was no more than a small counter between doors into Hall One – and from here could see right to ground level through the gap between the floor and the glass outer wall. When she arrived, there’d been a band playing near the café down there. Strange thing was, she’d seen half this band before, busking on Northumberland Street. This time the two brothers were performing with two other young men: fiddles, guitar and melodeon. Last Orders, a poster had proclaimed them. They looked like Arctic Monkeys gone folk, and had been joined by a female vocalist as Sarah watched, for a haunting song about whales.

That had been forty-five minutes ago. Then the band had packed up, and a matinée performance had started inside the hall:
A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra
. Monitors over the doors showed an auditorium full of schoolchildren.

She looked at her watch again. Zoë was still late, and there was still no sign of her.

The text had been a reply, of sorts, to the message she’d left on Zoë’s voice mailbox in the early hours, at the Internet café:

‘I don’t know whether you’re listening to this. I don’t know whether you’re able to. But if you are . . . I need your help, Zoë. I think something really bad has happened, or is about to. And I need to stop it. But I don’t think I can do that on my own . . .’

In the end, Sarah hadn’t needed Zoë’s help. But that didn’t defuse her smouldering sense that if she had done, it wouldn’t have been forthcoming . . . A sense itself smothered, in turn, by relief that Zoë was alive. Along with anger that she’d been alive all this time, and allowed Sarah to think otherwise.

If you let it happen, conflicting emotions could cripple you.

Take Russ, for example. She’d spoken to Russ at last. It hadn’t been a happy experience. He was forgivably pissed off about her extended absence; but less forgivably too pissed off to listen to the reasons for it. She’d had flashbacks to the derelict cinema while he’d been talking.
I
didn’t want to be with the spiders
, she wanted to say.
I’d rather
have been with you
. But because things happened the way things happened, she found herself responding angrily instead. And then the conversation had been terminated, and it had been too late to say anything.

She should call him now. It wasn’t really too late to say anything. But if she did, Zoë would turn up next moment, and then Sarah would have to disconnect and it would all be terrible again – With the thought, she scanned the level once more. But saw no sign of Zoë.

Gerard had left. Was in London by now, or at the very least, in a traffic jam quite near it. He’d given her a lift to the railway station, and had hugged her quite hard on leaving . . . As for Wright, he might be wandering the back lanes near the cinema still, in a daze. Wondering what he’d done to deserve this.

But she didn’t want to think about him.

One day soon, she’d call Gerard. Make sure he was okay, or as okay as circumstances allowed. And she’d talk to Paula. Sarah would try to forget everything she’d ever thought she’d known about Paula –
Hello!
magazine; designer labels – and listen instead to the woman she was talking to. She would try to hear the music. And after that she’d talk to Gerard again, to discuss what to do about Wright; something that didn’t involve instant justice in a cobwebbed court. If nothing else, there were always newspapers. Even the worst papers would jump all over a story like his. Especially the worst papers.

There was no way a rat like Wright could be allowed to get away with what he’d done.

All of this she would do, as soon as everything else was over.

She’d eaten breakfast after collecting her bag from the Internet café; had eaten two, in fact, to make up for however many meals she’d missed. After that she’d drifted around the quayside, cold and edgy, watching gulls bobbing on the water like they owned the place. She’d wondered where Zoë had been, and invented mental conversations with her. These always closed with Zoë’s abject apologies: pointless exercises in self-justification. But hard to resist all the same.

Time dragged when all you had to do was kill it. This was hardly news. She’d been in the Sage for some while. Had checked her bag in at the cloakroom, exactly as if she was here for the matinée performance.

And now she checked her watch, and it was 11.55.

‘You’d think they’d open the bar, wouldn’t you?’

She started, then recovered herself. It wasn’t Zoë, obviously.

‘Well . . . It’s a bit early.’

‘I didn’t mean for a drink. Just a cup of coffee, you know?’

He was about her age, with neatly trimmed dark hair and rimless glasses, and wore a long dark raincoat. She hadn’t heard him approach. He’d come to a halt a careful three yards distant.

She said, ‘Good point. Coffee wouldn’t hurt.’

He smiled, then leaned on the rail and looked out at the riverside.

Sarah checked left and right, but there was still no sign of Zoë.

Outside, the skies were blue, or nearly blue, with no trace of yesterday’s unstoppable rain. It was cold, though. Next time, if there was a next time, she’d bring a warmer coat, even if it proved less stylish. And thinking so, she brushed again at a smear on her collar, which she must have picked up in the cinema, and which she didn’t care to analyse too carefully.

‘Do you have someone in there?’

‘I’m sorry?’

The man had turned her way again, but was nodding towards Hall One. ‘Are you a parent? Lot of children in there.’

‘Oh, right. No, I’m just waiting for a friend.’

‘I’m not waiting on a lady,’ he said, and then, at Sarah’s confusion, added: ‘Stones song. Sorry. Bit of a fan.’

‘Right. Yeah, no. I remember that one.’

He grinned, and she knew him. And then the moment passed.

‘. . . Something wrong?’

‘No, sorry. Just remembering something.’

Though who she was remembering, she couldn’t have said.

Sarah resumed her outward gaze. A chord had been struck, and she was trying to follow the reverberation back to its source. But it all became part of the larger cacophony of the past days: of trains arriving and cars hammering past; of noisy voices in bars, and scuttlings in the darkness. Of hiding behind locked doors while unknown men prowled on the other side.

But that had been Jack Gannon. This man was no one she’d yet seen.

She shook her head. Memory was playing tricks. Something had suggested something else, which had suggested something else again. She was tired, that was the problem. And Zoë was still not here. She reached for her mobile phone, whose battery was so low it couldn’t have more than a couple of minutes’ life in it. It was hard not to empathize. But she pulled Zoë’s name onscreen anyway, and pressed Call. She’d avoided this so far, as if to phone once more would be to push her luck. As if the fact that Zoë had answered once meant nothing, while a failure to answer a second time would definitively indicate her absence.

During the moments it took her phone to respond, she glanced sideways at the waiting man. He seemed oblivious to her presence; had his back to the rail and was looking towards the monitor, presumably hoping for an indication that the performance was nearly over. He must be a parent.
Lot of children in there
. That was what she thought. And then in her ear, she heard Zoë’s phone ring.

And two yards away, a tinny Stones riff buzzed in a pocket.

Dah-dah – da-da-dah – da-da-da-da-da-dah-dah

She watched, unbelieving, as he calmly reached inside his coat, and pulled out his mobile. Held it to his ear. Pressed Connect.

The Stones died.

At her ear she could hear the same ambient noises that rang around the hall.

Into his phone the man said: ‘I changed her dial tone,’ and the words dopplered straight into her ear. ‘Told you I was a fan.’

Sarah lowered her handset.

‘Don’t stress out,’ he told her. ‘It’s not a big issue.’

And he smiled again, and she knew who he was.

Because things sometimes happen in synch, a noise clattered round the lobbies and landings at precisely that moment: a tray spilt in the café downstairs. Crockery was broken. In pubs and bars, such accidents provoked a communal jeer; here, there was instead a respectful pause, before events resumed their normal course.

Last time she’d seen this man he’d worn dirty blue jeans and a variety of shirts and sweaters, layered one on top of the other. His hair had been dead straw, and his face was grey from huddling in corners.

He’d sold her a
Big Issue
on the instalment plan. Pay now, collect later.

Looking back, she suspected that was a first.

She said, ‘Where’s Zoë?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘Where
is
she?’

That note hit the glass, and bounced off it like candlelight. She was aware of it splintering around the high spaces; of people she couldn’t see pausing to wonder what was up. It made her bite her lip. As if public embarrassment remained a consideration.

He leaned across to pat her hand. She withdrew it furiously.

‘What have you done with her?’

‘Please, Sarah. Don’t make a fuss. Not here.’ He gestured to the Hall behind him, as if Benjamin Britten might take offence. ‘If we’re going to talk, you have to stay calm.’

Her mobile phone was in her hand. ‘The police,’ she said. ‘I could have the police here in minutes.’

‘Why on earth would you want to do that?’

The look on his face was one of genuine puzzlement.

‘What have you done with her?’ she said again, less sure of herself.

‘I haven’t done anything with her,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where she is. And I’m worried about her. Same as you.’

Sarah opened her mouth, then wiped whatever she’d been about to say. ‘What do you mean, you’re
worried
about her – you’re – you’re
you
. You’re a killer. Don’t think I don’t know who you are.’

Though she didn’t, in fact, know who he was. He was Alan Talmadge. But that wasn’t even his name.

He said, ‘Now there, you see? You’ve been listening to Zoë. And she’s wrong about me, Sarah.’

‘She’s not wrong.’

‘She’s taken certain facts – facts capable of different interpretations – and she’s put them together and come up with this wild idea, this crazy story. But it’s not true, Sarah. I’m not the person she thinks I am.’

‘So who are you?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m what you see.’

‘So why the disguise – the homeless get-up? Why have you been hiding if you’ve nothing to hide?’

‘Do you always see things in such black and white?’

‘You’ve got her phone, for God’s sake – you’ve got Zoë’s
phone
. Where’s the grey in that?’

An usher appeared from round the corner – that would have been the moment to make her voice heard; to shout, if not
Rape
, then something equally incendiary. But the woman carried on round the curved wall, and if Sarah raised her voice now, she might lose whatever chance was being offered to find out what happened to Zoë.

He said, ‘There. That wasn’t difficult, was it?’

Sarah looked at him.

‘Not shouting out, I mean.’

She said, ‘You’ve got her phone.’

‘She left it behind.’

‘Zoë wouldn’t do that.’

‘Why do you think I’m worried about her?’

‘She was at the Bolbec. She was in Newcastle, doing a job. And you followed her here.’

He said, ‘You make it sound creepy. It wasn’t like I was stalking her. I wanted to make contact, that’s all. And I thought it best if I did that off home ground.’

‘So where’s home?’

‘This isn’t about me, Sarah. I just want to know Zoë’s all right.’

‘I’m not one of your lonely victims, Talmadge, or whatever you’re called today. I trust you as far as I could throw this building. You won’t tell me who you are, or where you come from, but I’m supposed to help you? Get a grip.’

‘I disguised myself, okay.’ He shrugged. ‘Zoë has certain ideas about me. As we’ve established. But she’s wrong, Sarah. And it’s important to me that she realizes that.’

His words, his being here – the very fact of him, when all she’d previously had to go on was Zoë’s stories. All of it, put together, amounted to a feeling like a slug crawling over her grave.

‘You were watching her.’

‘I was waiting for the right moment.’

‘You sent her an e-mail.’

‘. . . You’ve been looking at her e-mails?’

Sarah said, ‘I’ve been looking everywhere I can. Because there’s a body on a slab up there’ – and here she pointed through the glass wall; over the river; towards the heart of the city – ‘and it was wearing Zoë’s clothes, and carrying Zoë’s wallet, and for all I know it was Zoë. Except if it was, you wouldn’t be here, would you?’

He looked in the direction she’d pointed, as if the body might suddenly materialize, unshrouded, on the other side of the glass.